Nigel Fernandes is an airport services supervisor. A very smug airport services supervisor. And with good reason. When he is not working at Dubai International Fernandes, a jowly and thick-set 33 year-old from Mumbai, is the captain of his company's cricket team, the Fly Emirates XI.

It would be a stretch to describe the Fly Emirates XI as a typical club side, not as you might recognise from your own amateur endeavours on the village green. They are slightly better than that. Between them they have a smattering of first class experience, even the odd ODI appearance for the UAE here and there. Still, they are a fairly rag-taggle collection of cricketers, all of them Emirates employees: "porters, pursers, check-in-staff, baggage handlers and cargo operators", as they describe themselves.

And it is all relative, regardless. The Fly Emirates XI are dominant in their domestic league, where they play the likes of Air India and Lloyds TSB. But over the last three years or so they have faced a steep, and often embarrassing, step-up in the standard of the opposition they are facing. Emirates have been spending a lot on cricket sponsorship, an investment programme driven through by their 80 year-old vice chairman, the keen cricket fan Maurice Flanagan.

That sponsorship has extended to the proArch Trophy, a pre-season shindig in the UAE involving a few invited English county sides. As Emirates are the chief backers, and are seeking to develop the sport across the UAE, it made sense that their company XI should be included in the tournament. The upshot was that the airport amateurs found themselves facing Lancashire in a 50-over match last March. Lancashire made 262 for 5. The Fly Emirates XI managed 48. In the circumstance it was a fair score - they had been 13 for 8.

Faced with the prospect of a pair of Twenty20 fixtures against Surrey and Sussex this March, Fernandes and Flanagan have done what any good club men would do in a similar situation - they have recruited a ringer. And not just any ringer. Not, say, the kind of ringer The Spin has come across in its own occasional cricket career - the rangy Australian brother-in-law of the wicketkeeper's best friend say, who, his team-mates whisper, had trials for his county when he was 16.

No, the Fly Emirates XI have got a proper ringer - Shahid Afridi.

"I can't believe that Afridi will be playing for us" gushed the slightly gobsmacked Fernandes when the news was announced. "It will be an incredible experience for everyone in the team and a real honour to line up beside him."

Is there any sound sweeter than the chuntering of the opposition who have slowly, painfully, cottoned on to the fact that the man thrashing them around the field is a ringer? If there is, The Spin has not heard it. But picking and playing a ringer is a risky business, which can backfire unless you get it right.

Back in 1985 the Kings Head XI, a pub team from Santa Monica, California, managed to secure themselves the services of a ringer every bit as intimidating as Afridi, Ian Botham. It was a strange time in Botham's life. He had temporarily fallen under the spell of 'Lord' Tim Hudson, a part-time DJ and full-time raconteur, who spent a year working as Botham's publicist. Botham, who was conned into believing that Hudson could make him into "the next Sylvester Stallone", would later describe Hudson as the man who "very nearly succeeded in a) ending my marriage and b) turning me into an international joke."

Having flown over to Santa Monica from England, Botham arrived at the Kings Head XI's ground in a black Cadillac limousine with smoked windows, a television in the back and a crate of wine in the boot. "Botham accepted a late offer of breakfast," remembered one player, "Budweiser."

He hit his first two balls to leg, and then drove the third straight back into the hands of the bowler. He was out for a duck to a man named Carl McGinn, a BMW spare parts importer from El Toro. "I'm kind of disappointed," McGinn said afterwards. "I was looking forward to watching him bat."

Botham had also played as a ringer for The Spin's old local club in Bath, Lansdown. He and Viv Richards, who spent a full season at the club while he was qualifying for Somerset, would pepper sixes into the neighbouring Royal United Hospital. Lansdown were also once blessed with the services of Geoff Boycott, who in 1974 pressed himself upon them in his desire to get a little match practice after a bout of flu.

Memorably, Boycott hit the second, third, fourth and fifth balls of one early over for four, and then took a single off the last delivery. "He also had the ball changed," John Woodcock noted in The Times, "not that it was out of shape, but because it was leaving bright red marks on the blade of his bat." Boycott retired himself out on 108. "I was terrified I would run him out," recalled Boycott's opening partner that day, the Reverend Peter Trembath.

It was not so long ago that Kevin Pietersen turned out for Newick CC, tempted into playing by club captain Piers Morgan, who dispiritingly won KP over by offering a brief encounter with Simon Cowell in part exchange (The Spin wonders if Emirates got Afridi so cheaply). Pietersen's off-spin was carted for successive sixes by a 42-year-old businessman named Mark Symonds, though KP did at least clean bowl a cocky student who had attempted to switch-hit him over long-off. "Was he taking the piss out of me?" Pietersen asked afterwards, touchingly oblivious. He finished with figures of 2-57, though rather atoned for that by making 158 when it was Newick's turn to bat. They still lost though.

'If you hadn't bowled so badly, we'd have won,' Morgan told Pietersen after the match. "Yeah," Pietersen replied, "and if you had done anything at all, we might have stood a better chance too, you muppet." Morgan implies that the exchange was humorous. The Spin has its doubts.